Zlatibor Travel Guide

Drvengrad, also called Kustendorf or Mecavnik, is not a village that grew on its own but a wooden town built specifically for a film. The Serbian director Emir Kusturica had it constructed on Mecavnik hill in Mokra Gora for his 2004 film Life is a Miracle, which took the Jury Prize at Cannes, and the village was kept intact afterwards. What makes it unusual is that it is deliberate. Every building is timber, built to traditional mountain Slavic forms, and a number of the houses were moved here whole from surrounding villages and rebuilt, so the appearance and materials are original. It is not a heritage theme park but a designed rural environment: you walk its lanes, look at its facades, and use facilities that are still in service. The street names are the joke. Lanes are named for figures from Kusturica's films and his cultural heroes, among them Nikola Tesla, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Ernest Hemingway and Diego Maradona. At the centre stands a small wooden Orthodox church, both the core of the layout and the highest point of the village. There is also a small cinema, a library cafe, several galleries, and a hotel with pool, sauna and tennis courts, so the place works at once as a cultural complex, a set of museums and accommodation. Each January it hosts the Kustendorf Film and Music Festival, an important stop for European independent cinema, when the village fills up and rooms become very hard to find. The best pairing is the Sargan Eight: the 1925 narrow-gauge railway sits at Mokra Gora station just below, looping over the mountain in a figure eight with a single leg of about an hour and a half. Linking the wooden town and the railway into one day is the natural plan. It is about 40 km from Zlatibor, reachable by car or by changing at Uzice.